


Quarter to Three

by profanesouls



Series: Rebel Yell [2]
Category: Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26257369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/profanesouls/pseuds/profanesouls
Summary: She hadn’t spoken to Nines since that night she investigated the Brotherhood and she beat Bishop Vick into a bloody pulp. Mickey struggled to forget the look in his eyes that night, the icy intensity of his gaze making her stomach flip. Where she expected to see anger, disgust, and hate, she saw something that dangerously looked like sympathy. Maybe even a little sadness. She refused to acknowledge what else it could have been.As she flipped her phone open, that fluttering feeling in her chest turned to dread as she read: need to talk, you around tonight?
Relationships: Nines Rodriguez/Original Character(s), Nines Rodriguez/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Rebel Yell [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1902790
Comments: 7
Kudos: 19





	Quarter to Three

The ambient sounds of downtown Los Angeles filled the otherwise silent office space. Sounds of traffic, low music, and muffled voices of locals and tourists alike making their way back home before the sun rose. The office was small and cluttered, with boxes of paperwork still left unorganized and unfiled. The furniture looked secondhand, the walls needed a fresh coat of paint, and the AC hadn’t been fixed in a good couple of months. 

It was, by all accounts, a bit of a shithole, but it was home. 

Even though the Prince had been oh, so gracious enough to give Mickey a haven in Santa Monica, most nights it remained empty. Instead, she chose to stay in her office, where she could attempt to cling to normalcy in peace. Mickey currently sat on the fire escape, unseen by the general populace below. She was always good at going unnoticed. Or, at least she was, before she found herself wrapped up in the world of Kindred politics. All the political scheming and backstabbing was enough to make her head spin, yet she landed in the middle of it all. 

Not by choice, of course. If Mickey had her way, she would have been halfway across the country by now. It’s what she did — running away was a tough habit to break. It was difficult trying to ignore the pesky voice in her ear that urged her to pick flight over fight. It was safer that way; made it less likely to be hurt. Mickey knew that if she did try and run, it wouldn’t take long for Prince Lacroix to find her and bring her back kicking and screaming. Unless he didn’t just kill her first. 

Like he should have, if he’d had his way. Like he was going to, until Nines Rodriguez loudly objected to her premature execution. 

Her loud — and more than a little frustrated — sigh went unheard from her current position; elbows resting on her knees as she sat on the fireplace’s steps. The thump of bass from Confession nearby was strong enough that Mickey could feel it in her chest. Mickey swore quietly out into the night air. Her posture shifted as she brought a hand up to rake through her hair, annoyance bleeding through every movement. The nightlife of Los Angeles took no notice of the increasingly frustrated Kindred above them, too lost in their own little worlds. Mickey wished, idly, for a fraction of their ignorance.

She didn’t have that luxury, though. 

_Why the hell did he save me?_ The question had been at the forefront of Mickey’s mind for a while now. Ever since that night in the theatre. Then he saved her again from that pack of Sabbat. She asked Jack what he thought when she first came stumbling into the Last Round, disheveled and bruised, but alive. His explanation didn’t solve fuckall, but Mickey had been too chickenshit to ask Nines directly. 

She swore again. 

Then there was the night Mickey had investigated the Brotherhood of the Ninth Circle; the night she lost herself to the Beast. When she left the building, broken and bloody, she felt Nines’ eyes drilling holes into her back, and the shame of her actions still curled in her gut. The building was a map of her carnage and destruction, not to mention the mess she made of the Bishop himself. Mickey didn’t come out unscathed, either. Her shoulder still ached, but it was healing, and her Hunger was under control, but the emotional scars persisted. She could still feel Vick’s Vitae under her fingernails no matter how hard she scrubbed them clean. 

She lost control, but she was still alive, and she knew she’d have to deal with the consequences sooner or later. Mickey, of course, preferred dealing with those consequences later, hence why she’d been avoiding Nines and the rest of the Anarchs lately. She’d been avoiding Prince Lacroix, too, and he knew it. He sent her a rather scathing email, demanding her presence back at Venture Tower at her utmost convenience. 

Which, translated from corporate stooge language, meant: “Get your ass back here, _now_.”

Mickey knew that the longer she made him wait, the angrier he’d get, which is exactly why she hadn’t come crawling back yet. He probably had eyes and ears everywhere downtown, so it was a safe assumption that he knew about her frequent visits to the Last Round. The Prince just couldn’t take the fucking hint. 

Let him wait a little longer, lest he think she was some dutiful, Camarilla bootlicker. 

Among the shadows, Mickey reached into her pocket, pulling free her lighter and a cigarette. A nasty habit left over from her days when she was still living. A reminder of normalcy, an anchor to the world she was too stubborn to leave behind; like her office. A flame sparked in the shadows, illuminating her face in the darkness, and a sliver of fear also sparked at the small source of heat. She remained in control, lighting the end of the cigarette and snapping the lighter shut. Her lips wrapped around the filter and she inhaled deep, the smoke filling her dead lungs. Her body felt no rush from the nicotine, no spike in adrenaline, no release of dopamine. She sat there, a walking corpse surrounded by shadow and smoke, the bass from Confession reverberating deep in her chest. If Mickey closed her eyes, she could pretend it was her heartbeat.

Her reverie was broken as Mickey felt her phone buzz in her pocket and she groaned, stamping the cigarette out on the railing before grabbing the device. As she read the contact, her heart sank into her gut. Mickey briefly debated throwing the phone over the railing, an odd feeling fluttering in her chest. She hadn’t spoken to Nines since that night she investigated the Brotherhood and she beat Bishop Vick into a bloody pulp. Mickey struggled to forget the look in his eyes that night, the icy intensity of his gaze making her stomach flip. 

Where she expected to see anger, disgust, and hate, she saw something that dangerously looked like sympathy. Maybe even a little sadness. She refused to acknowledge what else it could have been. 

As she flipped the phone open, that fluttering feeling in her chest turned to dread as she read: 

_Need to talk. You around tonight?_

Mickey’s fingers twitched for another cigarette. She could ignore the text easily enough, get in a cab and be on her way to Santa Monica before the sun came up. That’s what the nagging, persistent voice in her head told her to do. Flight before fight. Run away while you still can. 

Instead, though, she typed a quick confirmation — as well as the address to her office — to the rather foreboding text. Mickey hoped her response conveyed a sense of cool nonchalance, because all she felt was an impending sense of doom that sat in the pit of her stomach like lead. As Mickey made her way back inside, closing the window behind her, those walls she carefully constructed over the years built themselves over her mind brick by brick. A defense mechanism from years of aimlessness, from moving from place to place and keeping people at an arm’s length; because they can’t hurt what they can’t touch. 

The clock on her wall read a quarter to three and her mask of cool detachment was in place. 

That mask threatened to slip, though, once Mickey fully realized that she invited Nines to her _home_ ; the one place she felt totally safe, the one place she allowed herself to be completely vulnerable. 

This time, she did light another cigarette, the taste of smoke anchoring her to the here and now. This was her domain, she reminded herself; she was in control here. What was wrong with her, anyway? A storm of emotions raged through Mickey at the thought of the stoic Anarch leader. She’d been thrust into this world of darkness suddenly and violently. Everything she learned about how Kindred society worked was through firsthand experience. She knew that almost everyone had some hidden agenda; either they were vying for power, influence, or profit, and they needed someone to do their dirty work for them. 

That’s how it happened in Santa Monica; Mickey had been bossed around by any Kindred with a week’s worth of seniority over her. 

She was a pawn in Lacroix’s game, she knew that, too. Mickey knew that she was on borrowed time, though. She was a calculated risk, a liability. Lacroix would have preferred her to die that night in the Nocturne Theatre, but now he had to figure out how to use her to his advantage. Mickey had no desire to be cannon fodder for some two-bit, prissy Ventrue prince, but every time she tried to weasel her way out of his machinations, he found a way to keep her there. 

Nines, though. Mickey didn’t have a guess at what his angle was. Why did he care so much? Why did he rush in, time and time again, to save her life? Why didn’t he fulfill his promise and kill her the other night when the Beast took over and she was more wolf than woman? Perhaps he just wanted her for the cause; she’d been helping out the Anarchs a lot lately, and she was fairly close with Smiling Jack — he was one of the only people Mickey could actually talk to about all this stuff. 

Her thoughts were interrupted at the sound of a knock at her door. She moved to stamp out the cigarette in the ashtray on her desk, fingers raking through her hair. His silhouette was outlined on the other side of the door, visible through the opaque glass. As Mickey opened the door, the sarcastic greeting she was prepared to give him died before it could escape past her lips, lodged somewhere in her throat as her steel gray eyes met his icy blue ones. 

The intensity of his gaze always seemed to knock the wind out of her, no matter how many times she saw him. She cleared her throat, searching for the words that got lost, before greeting him, “Hey.” 

“Hey, yourself,” Nines said, jutting his chin toward her office, “Can I come in?”

Mickey nodded, moving aside to let him pass. He did so, shoulder nearly brushing against hers in the process. As he moved further inside the office space, the walls felt even smaller with just the two of them inside. It was quiet, the ambient sounds of downtown LA muffled even more with the windows shut. Her small office was a vastly different environment from the Last Round — no blaring music, no rowdy bar patrons, no Skelter or Damsel to give her any snarky remarks about her assumed Kindred political alliances. 

It was just the two of them in Mickey’s dingy little office space that hadn’t seen any proper clientele in weeks. 

“‘Sundown Investigations’, huh?”

Mickey blinked at the sudden question, “Excuse me?”

A ghost of a smirk tugged at the corner of Nines’ mouth as he gestured to the door again, where the name of Mickey’s private investigation firm was painted onto the glass. She snorted, her hand moving to rub the back of her neck in a sheepish motion. 

“Yeah, uh, kinda ironic now, I guess,” she said, inwardly cringing at just how awkward she sounded. _Get a fucking grip, Mickey_. “I’ve just always worked at night, so it seemed fitting at the time.” 

Nines nodded, humming quietly in response. Mickey resisted the urge to light another cigarette and instead shoved her hands in her pockets, leaning back against the edge of her desk, her mask of detached coolness making her the perfect picture of bored nonchalance. 

“So,” she said, drawing out the word slightly, “you said you wanted to talk?”

“I do,” he confirmed. He stood with his back slightly to her, arms crossed over his chest, his face slightly obscured by shadow. Mickey’s calculating eyes struggled to get a read on him; he seemed casual, eerily calm in a way. There was no hint of hostility or anger, but the longer he waited to elaborate, the more the seed of paranoia in the back of her mind began to grow. 

He opened his mouth to continue, but Mickey beat him to it. 

“How come you didn’t kill me?”

The question caught them both off guard. Nines’ expression shifted to that of slight surprise, one eyebrow raised. Mickey begged her face to remain neutral and hoped to God her walls stood solid. The noise outside seemed to cease and the quiet turned nearly suffocating as Mickey waited for his response. Not even the Beast had anything smart to say, probably enjoying the thick tension too much to break it. 

“That’s a tough question,” he admitted, finally breaking the silence as he turned to face Mickey fully. His face no longer obscured by shadow, Mickey tried not to shrink from his gaze, defiantly meeting him head on. She was in control here, she reminded herself once again. 

“Truth is: I don’t know,” Nines said, moving to take half a step closer, “I don’t know why I didn’t kill you that night. Don’t think I could’ve, not when you looked like —” he stopped, as though trying to spare Mickey the truth. 

“Like what?” Mickey pressed, inviting the onslaught of brutal honesty. She needed to hear it, she needed to know what he thought, because he was so unreadable that she could never get a read on what he could possibly be thinking. 

“Like a goddamn wounded animal,” he finished, hand roughly dragging down his face. Another step closer this time, the walls seemingly closing in along with him, “you snapped out of it, anyway. You didn’t give me a reason to shoot.”

When the Beast locked eyes with Nines that night, she cowered in the corner, well aware of the threat he posed. When he called out to her, urging her to take back control, the Beast complied; releasing her claws from Mickey and retreating to the dark corners of her mind. Nines’ voice, a guide to bring her back to herself. Mickey didn’t want to think about the implications of that. 

“Yeah,” was all Mickey said, her gaze breaking from his momentarily, flashing to the bit of floor that lay under her shoes. The tempest of emotion continued to rage on, thousands of thoughts flashing through her mind like lightning. When she brought her eyes back up to meet Nines’, he could see the storm raging behind her eyes, that familiar sharp steel now dark as storm clouds. 

Another step, dangerously close now, close enough to touch if either one of them dared to reach out. “Somethin’ wrong?”

A noise that sounded suspiciously like a growl rumbled in her throat like thunder, but Nines didn’t budge, didn’t shrink away. 

“Why do you keep doing that?” Mickey bit out the question through clenched teeth, hands clenching and unclenching. Her senses were overloaded, her mind buzzing with questions and frustrations and feelings she really, _really_ , didn’t want to acknowledge, couldn’t acknowledge, because she didn’t understand. 

“Doin’ what, kid?” 

A disgruntled noise, followed by a rude gesture as she motioned between the two of them. Christ, she was bad at this. Letters and syllables bunched her throat, all of them threatening to pour out of her mouth all at once. 

“Saving me! Looking out for me, I don’t fuckin’ know! You stood up for me that night at the theatre, stopping that piece of shit French _asshole_ from killing me. Then, you show up just in time to stop those Sabbat from staking and leaving me for the sunrise. And now, I lost control, and you don’t kill me. So, why, Nines? Huh?” 

By the time her stream of consciousness was finished, Mickey was damned near breathless. If her heart could still beat, she was sure it’d be racing. Her walls were starting to slip, cracks appearing in the foundations. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, she was supposed to stay in control. Keep people at arm’s length, that’s what she did. 

Except, now, he was closer than an arm’s length away. She didn’t realize he’d gotten so close. She had to look up toward him now, in order to meet his gaze headon. Mickey nearly startled when she caught him smirking at her. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” 

A beat of silence, followed by a low chuckle in the back of his throat. “Why do you think I keep lookin’ out for you?”

Mickey blinked. She opened her mouth to respond, then closed it. This wasn’t how the conversation was supposed to go. 

“Because — because I’m useful?” She didn’t mean for it to come out as a question. 

When Nines didn’t respond, Mickey continued, “you want me for the cause, or whatever. Which, yeah, sure, I hate Lacroix, so if you — if the Anarchs need help, I’ll help, but if that’s why, then you should just say it —”

“Kid —” 

“— because Jesus Christ, I get enough bullshit power play from every other Kindred in this city, so —” 

“ _Mickey_.”

As he said her name, the rambling stopped. He was so close to her now. He clouded her senses, his presence a comforting haze she didn’t want to pull away from, not yet, not when he’d never been so close to her before. Mickey didn’t dare breathe (not that she needed to, anyway) so as to not break the tension. 

“I didn’t save you because I think you’re useful,” he said, voice low, but each syllable reverberated loudly in her ears, “I saved you because — shit, I —” 

It was uncharacteristic of Nines to fumble with his words. He was direct, brutally honest when he needed to be, and oh, so persuasive. That was why more and more Kindred flocked to his banner every night; they believed in him, believed in his cause and the convictions he would both live and die for. 

But honesty was different than vulnerability, which Mickey and Nines both seemed to struggle with. 

Mickey watched as his gaze flashed from her eyes down to her lips. He couldn’t place the shade of red; crushed cherries, red wine, day-old bloodstain. When his head dipped low, Mickey didn’t move as their foreheads gently met. His hands braced against the desk behind her, and she was thankful for its weight, because she’d started to feel weak at the knees. 

He was too close to look at now. A fluttering of lashes as her eyes shut, followed by that persistent flutter in her chest. She inhaled slowly, her own hands resting on the bare skin of his forearms. 

“Nines?” Mickey asked, voice barely above a whisper. 

He shifted, nose brushing ever-so-slightly over hers. A hair’s breadth away now, his mouth ghosting and feather-light against her own. Something snapped in her then — her composure, most likely — like a taut wire string. Mickey rose up on her toes and closed the distance between them. 

The kiss was soft, gentle, almost hesitant. It lasted a few seconds before Mickey pulled back on instinct, as though startled by her own gentleness. She didn’t make it far though, before Nines was kissing her again, an edge of desperation and hunger to it. It was not a gentle kiss; it was wild — primal, even. Mickey felt her lips bruise, her tongue tasting her own Vitae. Her hands snaked up his arms, one wrapped around his shoulder, the other resting against the back of his neck. She felt his arm grip her waist in turn, helping Mickey keep her balance as she stood on the tips of her toes. 

When they finally parted, a low whine escaped Mickey’s throat. Nines stepped back a hair, putting more distance between the two of them. Her hands rested on his forearms again, his on her waist. It was quiet again, but this time Mickey didn’t find the quiet as deafening. 

“This what you had in mind when you said you wanted to talk?” Mickey asked, that familiar bite of snark making its way back into her voice. 

Nines dared to crack a smile at that, “We are still gonna talk about this,” he paused, gesturing between the two of them, “whether you like it or not.” 

Mickey slid up to him then, something like a challenge gleaming in her eye, flashing like lightning. “Oh, yeah? That a threat? Or a promise?” 

“A promise,” he confirmed, that smile threatening to grow wider. 

“Speaking of promises,” Nines continued, albeit reluctantly, “I’ve got an appointment to keep, so I better get goin’.” 

Mickey nodded, that same snark bleeding through as she said, “Well, far be it from me to keep you from your adoring public.” 

Nines snorted as he readjusted the collar of his shirt. He paused then, really looking at Mickey, pinning her beneath the icy intentness of his gaze. 

“You’re probably the only person that could.” 

Before Mickey’s brain could even work fast enough to come up with a response to that, he bid farewell with a smirk and a raise of his brow. When the door shut behind him, Mickey was left with a new storm of emotions, but her chest felt lighter than it had in weeks. 

**Author's Note:**

> what if... i invited you to my haven... and we kissed... and we're both Anarchs.. 👉👈😳 haha jk... unless?
> 
> thank you for taking the time to read my work! this one was very fun to write, so i hope you enjoyed it. please let me know what you thought, i always reply to comments! 💕 a big thank you to my gf who gave this a once over for me, as well as those who left kudos on my last work, you guys are awesome! ଘ(੭ˊ꒳ˋ)੭♡


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